How the Rock Audience Got Too Big for Its Own Good

It seems worth noting from the outset that at this moment in
history I love rock and roll. I may not be as messianic (or as
intolerant) as I once was, but my enthusiasm for the music shows no
signs of abating. I'm not living off some edenic past, either. I see
100 or 150 sets, shows, and concerts each year, listen to thousands of
new LPs, and get what I need from artists who are active today. Age
always counts in rock and roll, so I'll add that some of these artists
are barely out of their teens, like the average record buyer, and some
of them are close to 35, my age. Since most of my cohorts in the Alan
Freed generation have acceded to the perennial rumor that rock is
dead, the old talent is no less encouraging than the young.

As a perennial scoffer at the perennial rumor, however, I must
admit that loving rock and roll can be problematic; the music goes
through, you know, changes, and right now confronts a dilemma. On the
one hand, to cop a line I wrote six months ago, the logic of profit
would seem to have created a market too large for the genre, but on
the other hand there are those who believe that the very same market
is about to shrink if not collapse. What makes this dilemma complex is
that its horns would seem to be antithetical--inimical not only to
those of us who must live with them but also to each other. If that's
so, of course, they may produce a synthesis. We can't be sure whether
such a synthesis would compound the dilemma or constitute a higher
historical plane. But perhaps by exploring the alternatives I can
explain why I don't anticipate the imminent passing of the music I
love.

I.

The first (post-Beatle) rock-is-dead rumors, which began about a
year after Sgt. Pepper, in 1968, originated with faddists for
whom the music had apparently been little more than another
bandwagon. When they jumped off, the main concern of rock and roll
partisans like myself was that not too many follow. I hardly noticed
that the music itself was actually getting better as the doomsayers
did their routines; because rock and roll still felt like a movement,
what I craved was a sense that the numbers would remain with us. And
indeed, over the next few years gigs moved from clubs to auditoriums
and from auditoriums to arenas while recording sales, we were told,
increased 50 per cent--ample compensation, it seemed, for the loss of
a few journalists, politicos, and other trend addicts. But it didn't
turn out quite the way I'd hoped.

Since I was (and am) some kind of socialist or communist, I never
went so far as to confuse a mass market with a mass movement, but the
parallels fascinated me. It was obvious enough that rock and roll
could not have arisen in a collectivist society. Its embrace of
upwardly mobile, self-reliant materialism was too passionate to be
passed off as brainwashing; I considered it ineradicably American, the
way brooding impassivity was Swedish. But if the combativeness,
individualism, and hedonism of rock and roll were so American, and if
some sort of collectivism would ultimately make more Americans
happier, then perhaps paying attention to rock and roll would help me
figure out how that individualism might evolve politically. Also, it
would be fun.

Such reasoning was obviously stimulated by the communalism of the
so-called rock culture. But the music did have a naturally
collectivist tradition of its own: Its heroes gathered in groups and
acted as if they had a right to society's riches despite their limited
technical achievements, invoking the support of young people who were
theoretically very much like themselves. Spreading the word (and the
music) were the inevitable impresarios, agents of change who, as the
English socialist Colin Maclnnes once observed, always seemed to get
left out of "plans prepared by writers of the New Left for the
diffusion of popular art in a socialist society." The way the left
dismissed the real work performed by such men and women had always
seemed shortsighted to me. If capitalists were mobilizing the alert
and volatile rock audience, it would be more appropriate to learn from
them.

Although I know that at the moment this kind of thinking sounds
passÚ to undaunted radicals and chickenshit liberals alike, I still
hold with much of it. But there was certainly a big problem with that
last idea--namely, capitalism itself. In "Socialist Impresarios," the
Maclnnes essay I quoted, a fascination with art promotion itself,
rather than profit, is identified as "the prime motive of the inspired
impresario temperament," and in a way this is true--it's what made
Jerry Wexler, the Chess brothers, and even Colonel Tom Parker support
rhythm and blues, Chuck Berry, and Elvis against an arrogant, ignorant
establishment culture. It's even possible to imagine Jerry Wexler, a
rather cerebral and enlightened businessman, functioning with
considerable satisfaction in an enlightened socialist system. But what
about the Chess brothers, who got into music via a junk route? Or
Colonel Tom Parker, who won't even play the White House free? Clearly,
profit counts as a motive too. And wherever there is profit you will
find businessmen of a much more up-to-date and dangerous type than our
promotion-obsessed rebels.

It's not that I don't think people in the music business like rock
and roll. It's just that I also think people in the hardware business
like nuts and bolts--and that if they run a modern hardware store they
prefer blenders and copper cookware. Now we're talking classy
merchandise: 14 speeds, rapid heat conduction, sturdy motor, burnished
craftsmanship. But also--and this doesn't enter the
pitch-profitability. Admittedly, there are still hardware dealers who
are as ardent about machine screws as Jerry Wexler is about Muscle
Shoals. But like the modern hardware entrepreneur, the modern record
executive--that urbane and pointedly liberal cross between Leonard
Chess and Harold Geneen typified by Warners's Mo Ostin or Arista's
Clive Davis--has a taste for the classy merchandise. And that taste is
conditioned by the executive's attraction to money, to profit and the
rich life that goes with it.

An example of how this can work is the rock LP, which catapulted
past the three-minute 45 a decade ago to become the staple of the
industry. Supposedly, this development reflected rock's newfound
artistic integrity, not unmentionable standards of profit per
unit. Yet once the commercial viability of the item had been assured
by its aesthetic ambitions, its aesthetic ambitions began to seem
expendable. Art is messy, difficult, and unpredictable, involving
risk, wasted time, and needless concentrations of product; good sound
is easier to buy than good music, and song samplers, concert
souvenirs, programming-plus-filler, and just plain kitsch are easier
to sell. Sure enough, well-engineered, well-played albums--classy
merchandise--soon became the rule, and audaciously conceived ones
rarities. Today an artist of the caliber of Randy Newman, who only
breaks even, has become a prestige property, like some publisher's
poet, and the purism of Steely Dan, who refuse to release waste
cuts. is regarded as newsworthy. So much for artistic integrity.

Initially, of course, the rock LP scared music-biz
conservatives. They knew LPs were a great way to make money; they just
weren't convinced rock LPs would sell without hits to suck the buyers
in. Ostin, Davis, and others, after undergoing a conversion experience
at Monterey, acted as inspired impresarios by taking their chances on
the unprecedented studio costs and musical unkemptness of the new
form. It was their enthusiasm, which quickly justified itself on the
charts, that gave the album sales network of FM stations, concert
promoters, and young, rock-savvy field personnel a chance to
develop. And it was only with that system in place that the industry
could be structured--as Marxists say, "rationalized"--at a higher
level of profitability.

The new system attracted the performers it deserved, with careerism
or, at best, devotion to craft replacing conviction and
invention. After all, what Grace Slick and Jim Morrison shared with
Duane Allman and Sly Stone wasn't the will to be rich-and-famous (a
British specialty in the '60s), but rather their intuition that this
apparently abject popular form was ripe with expressive
possibilities. Their genius was conceptual; in a sense, they pursued
rock and roll because they'd thought of it. One reason the
conceptual substructure of rock today often seems so expedient is that
their successors didn't have to make such a creative leap. Too often,
they were imitators, required only to mold their music and lives to a
professional pattern now understood to depend on brutal touring and/or
exacting session work plus continual cooperation with the powerful. Q:
How does a new group top off a rock concert? A: They kick ass--and
then they kiss it.

In this setting, the conventional distinction between art and
entertainment reasserts itself. Rock is entertainment. Even the rawest
hard rock groups now identify themselves as showmen, nothing more,
while the aesthetic aspirations of the classier singer-songwriter
types are distinguished primarily by their politeness. Still, it is
possible for canny survivors of undeniable talent--even, occasionally,
new-comers--to function creatively within and around this system, and
these lucky ones often get help from the industry itself, for the
modern record executive does invest ego as well as money in his or her
favorite artists. Unfortunately, the executives had no similar empathy
with people they perceived first and foremost as numbers on sales
sheets. No emotional outlay by the businessmen protected the integrity
and creativity of the audience.

II.

In 1968 or 1969, beguiled by the flowering of the youth subculture,
rock and roll partisans assumed that the music's audience would be
alert and volatile in perpetuity. We didn't buy the bullshit
hyperboles of the John Sinclairs and Theodore Roszaks, but we did tell
ourselves (and the world) that certain minimum standards of vivacity
were built into rock itself--that its sexuality, cross-racial
affinities, aura of altered consciousness, and generally rebellious
mood nourished and were nourished by the best tastes and impulses of
its fans. I don't wish to imply that the music business set about
deliberately to undermine this symbiosis--which, like the
counterculture itself, was destroyed by internal contradictions and
the breakdown of the myth of the affluent society. But the industry
did play a deleterious role, and all it had to do was act
naturally--that , is, rationalize the profit mechanism.

It is customary to think of the rock and roll audience as
comprising all Americans within a certain age range, but starting with
racial and regional splits the exceptions have always abounded. Even
among the paradigmatic 16-year-olds, many kids--more of them female
than male--have been too genteel or too stodgy or too snobbish or too
dull or too religious or too arty or too ornery or too busy or just
too weird for rock and roll. Also, intensity of involvement varies
enormously. The teenager who buys the Neil Sedaka single she hears on
a friend's radio is only a marginal part of an audience that includes
kids who own a Kinks LP before it even gets airplay.

In 1960, the year rock's first generation of crazies gave way to
guardians of pubic safety like Dick dark, record sales dipped; they
didn't pick up--not as much as was warranted by a baby boom then
unleashing unprecedented hordes of 13- and 14-year-olds on the
nation--until the Beatles picked up too (where Chuck and Jerry Lee had
left off). The Beatles created what we think of as the rock
audience. They pushed the age range in both directions, so that some
people started buying records as kiddies and l hung on into college
and after. They won back most of the arty, ornery, snobbish, weird
dropouts from rock and roll many of whom were already buying LPs by
Joan Baez and other folkies in patterns and quantities that presaged
the rock album market. And they made enthusiasts out of mere consumers
at a time when teenagers' spending cash was at an all-time high.

There aren't any hard figures--even today, the industry is
surprisingly negligent about demographic research--but it seems likely
that this audience kept getting better throughout the '60s. I don't
mean bigger, although that was also nice--I mean that its mix was
improving. It wasn't just a matter of more kids buying more records
per kid further into young adulthood, but of more weird kids, and
weird adults, getting into rock and roll. The result was another
crucial symbiosis, this time between rock's natural core audience and
all the fringe-type enthusiast who were tuning in. Granted, the mix
was still too male, and although more whites than ever cared about
black music--which for the most part was designed, unlike its white
counterpart, to cross over--the racial split also endured. Inevitably,
generational fragmentation--some of it activated as much by class or
education as by age--marred the consensus as well; this usually took
the form of a rather middlebrow I-can't-stand-that-kid-stuff line,
directed by older teenagers at AM "bubblegum" and by young adults at
the strident older-teenage music then known as white blues. But the
amazing truth was that almost all of the best music could be
appreciated by all but the youngest fans. Among artists who were both
popular and of quality, those who didn't attract an across-the-board
audience--soul singers, the odd AM hitmaker, Led Zeppelin
perhaps--weren't too hard to understand, but rather too easy. The
usual great names--Beatles-Stones-Who, Dylan-Hendrix-Joplin--pretty
much offered something for everyone.

For the health of the audience didn't depend on what was ordinarily
thought of as the music's message. Sure rock could be sexy, angry,
fervent, idealistic; sure it could turn people on. That was why it was
"youth culture." It made the young proud to be young, and kept
senescent over-25s in touch with what was worth preserving about their
past and passing selves (although to affirm that this was good is not
to deny what is more obvious now, that even good rock could also be
sexist, petulant, brutal, and self-pitying). But rock and roll wasn't
just youth culture, it was popular culture; accessibility was its
sweetest secret. Not only did it connect diverging generations, it
also kept relatively worldly people in touch with their
unsophisticated fellows and their own most elementary values and
impulses--while at the same time suggesting to the not-yet-worldly
that other truths lay beyond.

In other words, the best rock of the late '60s offered
complication, irony, analysis, expressive detail,
word-play/soundplay--aesthetic dimension--to those whose experience so
inclined them, but in a context of simplicity, direct statement,
celebration, irresistible kinetic force, and fun that satisfied those
whose experience and/or inclination limited them to that. The aesthete
part of the audience, which was of course much the smaller, sometimes
got a special frisson off its craving for rock's more fundamental
pleasures, as in: "The Supremes--what a trip." And this aesthetic kick
was not unlike the extra convolution of satisfaction to be found in
discovering
complication-irony-analysis-expressive-detail-wordplay/soundplay in
such an improbably accessible setting. But their involvement was more
than mind games. Just as their interest encouraged ambitious
music-making, so their example encouraged ambitious listening by the
larger audience.

Of course, not all of the adventurers, by any means, I arrived at
such an extruded aesthetic, and neither did those who created the
aesthetic objects. Like their fans, rock musicians were becoming more
sophisticated--they still loved rock and roll, they still were out for
a good time, yet they had outgrown (not abandoned) the truths it was
invented to deal with. But they too stopped at different levels--for
every Randy Newman or Peter Townshend there were five Roger McGuinns
and Jeff Lynnes, not to mention 20 Kenny Logginses and David
Byrons. And not all this development was neatly progressive, or neatly
divided into levels.

The rock audience as I've recalled it peaked around 1969, when
there were some 59 million people between the ages of 13 and 30 in the
U.S. Back then, an album which sold two or three million copies was
considered a miraculous smash. This suggests how partial (or inactive)
(or unrationalized) a "mass" audience can be. My generation, by which
I mean those born 1939-45, numbers about 18 million. If you were to
define a fan as someone who buys 10 albums a year, you might guess
that 25 per cent of my generation qualified, but even such a
conservative estimate would probably be rather high, for that would
make perhaps 8 per cent of the 13-to-30s responsible for at least $220
million of a total retail gross--tapes, 45s, country music,
everything? that was then less than $1.6 billion. Even among younger
people it is unlikely that more than 50 per cent were active. Among
aesthetes and politicos, however, the percentages were much
higher.

It often happens that aesthetes and politicos ignore (and are left
out of--the aversion is mutual) popular culture; in the '50s, for
instance, teenagers from "cultured" homes often shunned rock and roll
and only rarely lived for it the way other kids did. But in the late
'60s their disproportionate involvement turned culture heads--people
capable of something more thoughtful than a reflexive identification
with counterculture usages--into an influential bloc. Often this
vanguard allied with the audience's natural self-educated
leaders--those fans who by virtue of their openness, low tolerance for
bullshit, sensitivity to the Zeitgeist, and good ears tended to
support adventurous music early and awaken the uninitiated--and
sometimes they turned into leaders themselves. They were a finicky
lot, though, and began to desert as soon as the rock-is-dead rumors
began; their visionary costumes and astute heckling were missed at
concerts by 1970, and once their absence was felt the fun went out of
live music for a lot of others. I've labeled these early deserters
faddists, and I was never crazy about having them around, but faddists
have their uses--their unreasonable demands for innovation keep things
moving. Instead, the music seemed to slow-down, Altamont and the
Beatle break-up kicked in, and soon the vanguard bloc had deteriorated
badly. Even some of the natural leaders gave up, and those who stayed
in became obsessed with technique. Increasing record sales merely
diluted what power the remnants of the old alliance retained.

In the industry, this process was regarded as both inevitable and
meaningless when it was noticed at all. It's hard, after all, to hold
on to a demanding, nebulous sub-audience; if one translates "hard" as
"impossible" (i.e. not cost-effective) then one will inevitably let
that audience go, for, after all, what the loss will mean can never be
measured. It's certainly true, however, that by the mid-'70s the
audience as a whole had lost most of its passion/taste/tolerance for
the genuinely visionary, as opposed to the escapist, and the genuinely
critical, as opposed to the fecklessly pessimistic. And it would
appear that after a time lag this letdown was absorbed by veteran
artists as well. John Lennon and the Rolling Stones, each of whom
helped define rock's unique fusion of visionary kinetics and critical
Úlan with two early-'70s albums (Plastic Ono Band and
Imagine, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main
Street), followed with product that was wan and repetitive, their
worst ever. The Who and Neil Young outdid themselves on Who's
Next (1971) and After the Gold Rush (1970); neither the
self-referential Quadrophenia (1973) nor the fine, harrowing
series of albums that begins with Time Fades Away (1974)
approached the old expansiveness. And the two veterans who did do
accessible and exciting work in the mid-'70s, Eric Clapton and Bob
Dylan, both played off invidious trends--laid-back easy-listening rock
(Clapton's 461 Ocean Boulevard) and arena bombast (Dylan and
the Band's Before the Flood).

Granted, the causal connections in this mess cannot be mapped. If I
were a rigorous Marxist or a smooth-talking capitalist I'd probably
blame it all on the economic base, that's certainly where a lot of the
blame belongs. But as a Marxian moralist with an unnatural fondness
for art that makes trouble (whether it makes money or not), I resent
those in power. For it's undeniable that among major labels, even in
the late '60s, only Warners--sparked by copywriter (later
vice-president) Stan Cornyn--pursued rock's vanguard audience with
anything resembling enthusiasm. Soon growth-obsessed corporations were
eagerly snipping a little off the top of their audience in an effort
to broaden its base, automatically sacrificing the marginal artist to
the potential biggie. A more arrogant version of that attitude thrives
today.

By top I don't mean age--the cut-off year has remained around
30. Mean purchasing age, however, has been inching higher, and it will
get higher yet. I spoke not long ago with a demographics expert at a
major label who advocated spending $900,000 promoting one $100,000
artist rather than signing 10 for $100,000 apiece--the sort of
capital-intensive reasoning responsible for the record ads now
proliferating on TV. This fellow pooh-poohed the conventional wisdom
about a specialized music market. His company would sell more records,
I was told, by inducing every 30-to-40-year-old to purchase one a year
than by getting all the kids who bought one a week to buy two. Rock
fans shouldn't let this worry them, he went on, because "musical
tastes remain unchanged" with age. Although, actually, there was "a
change in the use of music as one gets older." An example? Well. "I
continue to love the Beatles but can no longer stomach the Rolling
Stones."

This demographics man is an extreme instance. Most modern record
executives did, after all, choose music as their field; lip service to
the creative process--sincere lip service--comes naturally, to them,
and it's a little shocking to encounter somebody preoccupied so
exclusively with rationalizing the profitability of the classy
merchandise. But it does help one understand how inoffensiveness
becomes a conspicuous goal in culture sales. With the big-money
success of albums--real (if contained) rock albums, not inspired
rockish MOR in the manner of Tapestry and Bridge Over
Troubled Water--like Fleetwood Mac and Frampton Comes
Alive!, the music industry seems to be flirting with a blockbuster
mentality like the one that dominates movies. Now, The
Godfather is a great film and Jaws quite an entertaining
one. But if Fleetwood Mac is our Jaws, Frampton Comes
Alive! is more like The Poseidon Adventure. And The
Godfather may have been a fluke.

III.

The rock audience today can judge good product but seems to have no
instinct for interesting music, which it stumbles upon as if by
accident; those with the instincts are either too isolated to exercise
economic power or out of the market altogether. That is, the logic of
profit would seem to have created a market too large for the
genre. But what if the market were to get smaller? This may sound
unlikely after all my plaints, but not everyone thinks so. The
rationalization of rock is a fact; the growth rate of the music in the
four-year period preceding Beatlemania (the Dick Clark era) was 16 per
cent, while the rate in the 1970-1973, the four years after Altamont
(when corporate rock took hold), was 27 per cent and increased to 81/2
per cent annually over the next two years. All this occurred even
though percentage increases become harder to sustain as raw numbers
get bigger, and even though the industry was much more dependent on
rock in the '70s than in the early '60s. But the 1970-73 growth rate
didn't approach that of the first four Beatle years. What's more, it
reflected not LPs sold but list price dollars--inflationary
dollars. In fact, between 1973 and 1975, the first three years the
industry reported unit sales, the number of albums to cross the
counter remained at around 280 million, although tape sales did
increase.

It is said that the figures for 1976 will be higher, but it is also
said that the relief will be temporary. For the rock generation is the
baby-boom generation, born 1946-55, and, theoretically, it is running
out--soon more people will leave the 13-30 age range than will enter
it. This statistic is enjoying a vogue in the industry right now,
which is one reason the idea of selling an LP a year to everyone 30-40
suddenly seems so brilliant. But although the people who are now 30 to
40 were the record market not long ago, nobody seems to know
how to get them back. Given this quandary, the bland-out approach will
of course be favored. As it happens, Tapestry and Frampton
Comes Alive! and Fleetwood Mac were all freak hits by
artists who'd been around for years with no notable commercial or
musical breakthroughs, but industry strategists will try to duplicate
them anyway. If they're smart, they'll support likely artists rather
than attempting to order up such product by fiat--for it also happened
that two of those three all-purpose best-sellers (not Frampton's) are
much too personal, even idiosyncratic (even visionary, if one can
speak of pleasant visionaries) to be ordered up. The industry
strategists may succeed, too, but I wonder if their success will be
cost-effective. For there is as yet no indication that even artists
like Fleetwood Mac, epiphanies of homogenization and all, can be sold
to large numbers of over-30s. Too loud.

Non-leisure-class art consumption automatically drops off as people
busy themselves with the commitments of adulthood, a tendency
exacerbated by television, which provides audiovisual diversion at the
flick of a switch--take it or leave it, no purchase necessary. But
even movies (which at their shrillest zap level offer the escape of a
night out) or Gothic/sex/detective fiction (which is silent, and who
needs more noise when there're children around?) are more easily
adapted to the needs of settled young parents than raucous rock and
roll records. So are many of the higher-status forms, for that
matter. Nevertheless, the one sub-audience that might value the sheer
physical challenge of rock and roll, a challenge the young find
exhilarating, is the same legion of aesthetes who left the music under
mysterious circumstances six or seven or eight years ago. A test
market of about 180,000--just one per cent of us 18 million 1939-45s,
say--would ease the minds of industry worry worts, providing a
creative entree to the lost 30-40s. Too bad.

If that sounds like a fantasy, which of course it is, well, maybe
the baby-boom disaster is also a fantasy. Not that it isn't a powerful
one. Stan Cornyn, the very same copy-writer who put Warners on top of
the youth market in the * late '60s with his Fugs Dream Date and Happy
The Mothers Day ads, is among the concerned. He recently told Ken
Emerson in New Times: "When the last of the baby boom is buying
refrigerators, when they walk out of college and into the church or
synagogue and get married, that's when the trouble starts." Emerson
added: "Statistically, this translates into three or four years from
now." But this hermeneutic applies only if we're discussing the baby
boom--not the collapse of the under-30 market. For the baby boom was a
wonder of rates and percentages based on the abnormally slow birth
patterns of the Depression and World War II. There were about four
million more Americans born in the decade after the baby boom than in
the baby-boom decade itself. The number of 13-30s should rise well
into the '80s, declining only when the lowered birthrate of recent
years is felt; even so, there will be one or two million more 13-30s
in 1990 as there were in 1972.

Nevertheless, the reasons a scare might arise aren't hard to
deduce. Foremost is that the logic of profit dictates growth; no
single market can expand fast enough when there are other markets out
there begging for exploitation. A related factor may be that the
birthrate is lower among affluent whites than among blacks and others
with less discretionary income. But there may be a more compelling
motive, psychologically. The whole aim of rationalization, after all,
was to suck in kids who weren't naturally attracted to the music, and
now--especially with no counterculture rhetoric to provide a semblance
of fellow feeling--the modern, rock-savvy execs often find they don't
much like the people they're selling their product to. They seem so
young, and not so classy; real adults would be reassuring. When
you're always thinking bottom line you begin to perceive everything in
terms of statistics anyway. Why not attribute the miraculous ascension
of rock and roll to demographics rather than to any qualities of its
own?

None of which is to suggest that a scare couldn't have real
effects; that's why stock market crashes are called panics. One can
envision a music industry geared to investment in so-called adult rock
overextending itself into a expensive background music that
mysteriously fails to generate enthusiastic sales. In that instance,
venture capital for the rare young rocker with bite and drive and wit
and originality might well dry up altogether. For despite everything
I've said good music has survived and in fact thrived in the
interstices of the system. Not everyone in the business is a glib
asshole, even the glib assholes have been known to lapse into courage
and passion, and the smarts and dedication (even the sheer quality) of
certain artists--still aided, on occasion, by inspired-impresario
managers--have proved irresistible. My own bottom line is records--how
many make me really happy. And while there was definitely a lag around
1975 and 1976, they haven't stopped coming, between 30 and 100 per
year depending on how loosely I define happy, many of them as good as
or better than any of the records that got me here in the first
place. The only problem is, I can't trust people to buy them
anymore.

In trying to explain the formal thrill I got from rock and roll--an
aesthetic sensation I was (and am) sure transcended my nostalgia, my
ignorance, and my base nature--I used to posit outreach as a formal
quality. I insisted that the music did more than organize notes,
rhythms, timbres, and words, for often the most interesting facet of a
rock musician's sensibility involved assumptions about audience, and
the music could take me to them. Sgt. Pepper connected me with
an imagined fellowship as real and rich, aesthetically, as any other
idea or image it evoked. Perhaps it could even be said that this
connection existed in an as yet unrecognized aesthetic dimension that
was the special province of the popular artist--call it the communal
dimension. Sadly, the music I like doesn't take me to that dimension
much anymore; an imagined community has been destroyed, at least for
me, with the rationalization of the market.

But by obliging me to perceive rock and roll from a more
conventional artistic perspective, the loss of that dimension has
brought home what less extruded listeners have always known: that rock
and roll holds its own as a mere organization of notes, rhythms,
timbres, and words. Just as some people love dance for its special
revelations regarding space, motion, and the human body, I love rock
and roll for its special revelations regarding class striving, youth
and age, race, and the urban environment, to start with the obvious
stuff. My political assumptions of a decade ago remain firm: I don't
know how anyone can care about class and community in America without
paying attention to what the music has to say. Not that the message
can't be repetitive--most fans and artists turn its form into an
excuse for their own stagnation, trafficking in received ideas about
generation, energy, rebellion, and good times that lack the conviction
of discovery even when they're true. But the pissed-off working-class
intelligence of a Graham Parker or the wryly neurotic extended
adolescence of an Alex Chilton is available nowhere else, and if you
think none of that has to do with you anymore, then you're very
different from me.

Whether artists like Parker and Chilton represent last-gasp
attenuations of a moribund tradition or genuine fresh air can't be
known for certain, but despite the lag of the last two years they are
definitely on the increase. Many of them work out of New York, which
is appropriate given the consciously aesthetic cast of the trend, but
there are certainly dozens of demotic geniuses hidden away in odd and
not-so-odd corners of this country and the rest of the
world. Meanwhile, veteran rockers, like any artists, seem subject to
creative ebb and flow--who knows when or whether John Fogerty (or John
Lennon) will come up with another great album, or where the next Bob
Seger (or Fleetwood Mac) is coming from. Furthermore, there are
related satisfactions outside the strict rock tradition. A
rock-inspired anti-sentimentalist reaction has put a lot of new life
into country (and western, too). Folkies have survived the folk-rock
panic of the late '60s to work in candidly pop formats, return to
relative purism, or tend to their hybrids. Years of vaguely rockish
electronic noodling in Europe are finally bearing music. Even in
jazz--much more an art music, at least since the '40s, than these
other-forms--a new generation of players seems equally comfortable
with abstruse modern experiments and the humble usages of the '20s and
before.

Not many such artists enjoy a mass audience, although almost all
enjoy loyal if not luxurious support, at least around their home
bases. In some cases--as in the expanding cults of Lou Reed's children
now discernible--along the mid-Atlantic corridor and in certain
Midwestern cities, particularly Cleveland and Detroit--this support is
reminiscent of the rock vanguard I've been bemoaning, and it is
usually young. It is a commonplace that, compared to the idealistic
youths of the '60s, Today's Young People are passive conservatives
caring only for own survival, and anyone who attends a lot of rock
concerts can understand where that image is coming from. But
apparently the rationalized rock audience is so large that it has
produced a backlash of Major proportions--a backlash inspired by '60s
expectations. No matter how defiantly they reject the sentimentalities
of hippie-style bohemianism, even Lou's children are defining an
"alternate culture" of their own; the supporters of the best jazz and
folk and country music often pine unabashedly--and sometimes rather
sentimentally, I'm afraid--for such a culture. Are these tendencies
elitist? Of course they are, with all the short-sightedness and
snobbery that implies. But they do support a new generation of artists
who epitomize--and, as usual, improve upon--the various sensibilities
involved. The fact that popular culture serves as a corrective to
elitism does not mean it can survive without leadership; at least its
best elites are meritocracies, and its standards of merit generous,
flexible, and imaginative. And for organizing notes, rhythms, timbres,
and words--an order of business that must precede any larger cultural
mission--these upstarts will do just fine.

I don't know how large the new vanguard might be, but I do expect
it to create a certain commercial spillover, so that records are at
least produced and further artistic action inspired, at least until
the music biz's venture capital really does dry up, if it ever
does. And even in that case I can't believe it would be so minuscule
as to be worthy of no inspired impresario's time. One of the
unanticipated resurgences of the middle '70s has been that of the
indie labels, less like the fly-by-nights and small-time regionalists
who made pre-Beatles rock happen than like the self-reliant jazz
companies, but something like both. They're most prominent in folk,
where Philo, Rounder, Flying Fish, and Adelphi have all achieved a
foothold, but the most successful financially has been Matthew King
Kaufman's Beserkley, which has thrived in a small way by going with
too-weird-for-Warners Jonathan Richman. Of course, such companies are
self-reliant but not upwardly mobile or materialistic, unlikely ever
to provide more than the beginnings of living money for their artists,
or the most specialized kind of fame. Can rock and roll remain rock
and roll without making its practitioners rich and famous? And if it
does, what will that tell us about our combative, individualistic,
hedonistic people? I'm willing to find out.